Hutcheon's Beginning to Theorize Adaptation seemed to focus on Walter Benjamin's phrasing, "Storytelling is always the art of repeating stories"(p. 2). From the beginning of time, people have talked and told stories and fables, including every day life and mystical fantasy and everything in-between supplying the criterion for keeping an audiences' interest. As the author puts it on page three, we are "culturally recycling", adding and revising and interpreting, from the mind of an adapter and from the eyes of the audience.
What really stood out were the differences in the way the adapter took the original (but most likely already adapted) piece and transformed it and how the audience interpreted it. As with an adaptation, if the audience knows the work that the film, novel, video game or other medium is referencing or recreating, then "we always feel its presence shadowing the one we are experiencing directly"(p. 6). Knowing the original work and seeing it adapted can be difficult for some, and even down right offensive. As when viewing a favorite novel or comic in cinematic form, I even find myself critiquing, agreeing, and hopefully sometimes respecting, what the adapter has done. The audience can feel self entitled to it's favorite piece of literature, and doing it injustice can be heartbreaking, even when its fidelity is a page by page recreation.
Questions that I'm left with:
1) How true must an adaptation be to the original to still be considered an adaptation? Is there a difference between "based on" and an adaptation?
2) What, legally, can an adapter get away with when making something, be it film, comic, or other media, before it becomes plagiarism even with the intent of adapting?
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